We are products of history. We must be; Hegel, Marx and Fukuyama all agree.
Europe is awash with theoretical responses to the current terroristic Politics of Derangement. One was Hollande’s plan to strip French nationality from dual citizens convicted of terrorism. Quite a threat.
There is a review of Christiane Taubira’s Murmures à la jeunesse on the terrorism in France. The reviewer says the short book, translated as "Whispers to the Young," offers a "particularly compelling (and upbeat) contribution to the debate of managing this"... Politics of Derangement. Taubira, from Guyana, was France’s Justice Minister until her resignation in late January 2016 because of her opposition to Hollande’s plan. As she notes pointedly, none of the nine men who carried out the November 2015 attacks in Paris was binational; but twenty-seven of the victims were. Her tract caused a sensation when it was published a week after Taubira’s resignation.
Taubira’s silent interlocutor, never mentioned explicitly, is her nemesis the hardline Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who publicly declared that there was no point trying to understand the appeal of jihadism, as “to understand terrorism was already in some sense to justify it”.
The reviewer states "Taubira makes a powerful case against the securitization of Islam, and of Muslims in general: she points out that jihadism is attractive not for its religious message, but in its quest for a radical break with the established social and political order. She observes, in this context, that a high proportion of jihadist sympathizers are recent converts to Islam. Above all, she affirms that jihadism is not a purely home-grown phenomenon, but is inextricably intertwined with the calamitous failings of Western policy in the Middle East, from Palestine and Iraq to the more recent cases of Libya and Syria."
It is a reaction, a dialectic, of history.
But there is a lot less going on here in Nice and Orlando than that. These were peripheral philosophical acts, at most. These were acts of seriously deranged people who, in the heat of a homicidal frenzy, wrapped themselves in an available flag.
There is an obvious problem here: Every individual , however destructive, if sane, has a point. He has some combination of educational and personal factors that led to his position and action. Nazis, embittered over the first war and its treaty, had a point. But the homicidal derangement syndrome we are watching unfold (and, probably, develop to larger and more efficient weaponry) has a very special characteristic: The loss of human empathy, the inability to identify with fellow members of the species.
That is very rare among the sane although it is characteristic of shards within the culture like drug cartels. And, of course, cartels have their story too. But dealing with them as a logical outgrowth of history might be giving them a lot more depth than they deserve..
Europe is awash with theoretical responses to the current terroristic Politics of Derangement. One was Hollande’s plan to strip French nationality from dual citizens convicted of terrorism. Quite a threat.
There is a review of Christiane Taubira’s Murmures à la jeunesse on the terrorism in France. The reviewer says the short book, translated as "Whispers to the Young," offers a "particularly compelling (and upbeat) contribution to the debate of managing this"... Politics of Derangement. Taubira, from Guyana, was France’s Justice Minister until her resignation in late January 2016 because of her opposition to Hollande’s plan. As she notes pointedly, none of the nine men who carried out the November 2015 attacks in Paris was binational; but twenty-seven of the victims were. Her tract caused a sensation when it was published a week after Taubira’s resignation.
Taubira’s silent interlocutor, never mentioned explicitly, is her nemesis the hardline Socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who publicly declared that there was no point trying to understand the appeal of jihadism, as “to understand terrorism was already in some sense to justify it”.
The reviewer states "Taubira makes a powerful case against the securitization of Islam, and of Muslims in general: she points out that jihadism is attractive not for its religious message, but in its quest for a radical break with the established social and political order. She observes, in this context, that a high proportion of jihadist sympathizers are recent converts to Islam. Above all, she affirms that jihadism is not a purely home-grown phenomenon, but is inextricably intertwined with the calamitous failings of Western policy in the Middle East, from Palestine and Iraq to the more recent cases of Libya and Syria."
It is a reaction, a dialectic, of history.
But there is a lot less going on here in Nice and Orlando than that. These were peripheral philosophical acts, at most. These were acts of seriously deranged people who, in the heat of a homicidal frenzy, wrapped themselves in an available flag.
There is an obvious problem here: Every individual , however destructive, if sane, has a point. He has some combination of educational and personal factors that led to his position and action. Nazis, embittered over the first war and its treaty, had a point. But the homicidal derangement syndrome we are watching unfold (and, probably, develop to larger and more efficient weaponry) has a very special characteristic: The loss of human empathy, the inability to identify with fellow members of the species.
That is very rare among the sane although it is characteristic of shards within the culture like drug cartels. And, of course, cartels have their story too. But dealing with them as a logical outgrowth of history might be giving them a lot more depth than they deserve..
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